The premise - that Anton Chekov wakes from a coma, body miraculously still
functioning - is far-fetched but there’s no question that the comedy is
sharply written. Rating: * * *

“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be astonishingly, unimaginably beautiful,” Vershinin declares in Three Sisters, in one of the many speeches in Chekhov’s drama that looks ahead in wonder - and poetic hope - at the future of mankind.

The natural instinct one often has, when watching his characters philosophise and speculate about posterity, is to murmur “If only they knew” - and that’s been seized on with satirical relish by the academic and playwright Dan Rebellato.

Chekhov in Hell imagines what it would be like if the great man found himself alive and just about kicking in modern-day Britain; and, as the title amply forewarns, the world he encounters a century after his death isn’t only a sorry disappointment, it’s positively infernal.

You have to let a lot of obvious objections slide when you’re watching this. The premise - that Anton C wakes from a coma, body miraculously still functioning - is plainly on the furthest side of far-fetched.

More problematic is the sense that Rebellato splashes around in the shallows of our culture - lampooning vacuous TV people, a soulless proselytizer for the web and a bovine master chef among many others - without acknowledging the advances, in medicine and welfare say, that would impress a revenant Chekhov. He manages to integrate modern Russian gangsterism and sex-trafficking into the storyline, but you also wonder whether a play more explicitly about what Chekhov would make of his homeland today wouldn’t have made for more challenging and pertinent fare.

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Whatever its shortcomings, though, there’s no question that the comedy is sharply written, pulsing with spleen and ideas, and packed with nice throwaway gags (at one point, the errant author “tweets” that he has just auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent, doing an impersonation of Maxim Gorky). As directed by Theatre Royal Plymouth’s artistic director Simon Stokes, one encounter pushes rapidly into the next - and, in a canny nod to Brechtian alienation techniques, titles accompany the arrival of each dislocating scene.

With five fellow cast-members conjuring multiple roles around him, Simon Scardifield’s stiff-limbed Chekhov, reduced by his broken English to beautiful understatement, and looking forlorn and faintly absurd in his linen suit and pince-nez, is by turns full of childlike bafflement, seized by passing delight and brought low by poignant dismay. “I want to know what has happened to the world,” he pleads. It’s a fair question, isn’t it?